At left are two conjoined off shore oil rigs. The whale seen venting in the foreground was cited for ruining the photo and released on his own cognizance. Hurricane Earl is headed toward us here on the Atlantic coast, and the best thing about Earl, according to those posted on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, is that Earl will be our problem, not theirs. Offshore drilling, under discussion and proposed to begin soon before BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig blew up, killed its crew, and began hemmorrhaging oil into the Gulf at a furious rate, is now suspended for the time being. Good call, DOE and President Obama.
But what if Earl, as of this date threatening the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a prime area proposed for offshore oil drilling, were bearing down on hundreds of offshore rigs, as Katrina and Rita did in the Gulf five years ago? Over a hundred rigs were damaged or destroyed in that storm season, although no catastrophic spills were recorded on the scale of this year’s Deepwater Horizon disaster. What would be the real impact of a big storm unfettered by the shore effects present in the Gulf, a storm free to go wild in the open sea?
When my children were small, we vacationed for several years in the Outer Banks area, in a non-posh resort community I will not name but remember fondly. We swam, we waded, we walked the hot sands, we ate shrimp cooked in iced tea (a local speciality and acquired taste), we visited the dune shrine where the Wright brothers risked life, limb and their death of cold to keep a wild , Newton-defying contraption airborne for a few seconds. We carried our children out into the surf and dropped them into the roiling, emerald waves. We gazed out toward Europe across the farthest horizon and saw—– nothing. We also saw the erosive effects of recent storms and congratulated ourselves that we would soon return to New England, where we get a fraction of the storm activity of the Outer Banks, and most often weary storms that have already spent their strength on the lower Atlantic coast.
Oil rigs offshore in the Atlantic? This link from the Christian Science Monitor of 05 describes the damage done by storms of that year to oil rigs in the Gulf. It was scary. The two largest rigs in operation at the time were both damaged, one actually capsized. This link cites a common safety contractor and consulting firm hired by several oil companies to strategize spill control before Deepwater Horizon. The report did not go into detail about the not-yet-imagined Deepwater scenario. What it did was assure its clients that no significant impact would be felt in the indigenous walrus population. Goo goo gajoob. No walruses have been cited in the Gulf of Mexico since Rush Limbaugh fell off his yacht a while back, and not for ians and ians before that.
If we can’t trust our energy suppliers to be governed by their better selves, then I for one am willing to let Energy Secretary Stephen Chu look into it and give me a thumbnail. As Shakespeare’s Beatrice said, I can see a church by daylight. What I don’t want to see is the Atlantic coast looking like the Caspian Sea viewed from the hills over Baku (see photo below). Or clouds of petroleum rolling in where my children used to play, and where their children will want to play, if they can. 
We’ve posted on tankless water heaters before, but an inquiry from a client prompts us to revisit some of our reservations about tankless units. Wonderful idea, of course, good for energy, wish i’d thought of it myself, and all; but do your homework and keep your eyes open. Claims made for tankless heaters are larger than they seem in real life.
First, flow rate. You need at least three gallons per minute of hot water at 125 degrees fahrenheit to operate a laundry machine, dishwasher, shower, kitchen sink or any combination of two faucets or appliances in the house. if your teenager is in the shower and you go downstairs to start the dishwasher, you will be cited by Family Services in this litigious society, for cruelty to a teenager. Sharing the output of a tankless electric unit is dicey. And families living in multi-bathroom houses will, sooner or later, need to share that output.
Second, power needs. The only electric tankless that begins to fill the bill for a family is something like the Bosch AE 125 . The power requirement of this water heater is app. 125 amps at full load. Do you have a 100 amp service feeding your entire house, as I do? Fuhgeddabouddit. You can’t install electric tankless in your house. Do you have a 200 amp service? Expect to give away 60% of that capacity while using hot water, which means that you can’t operate your electric range, air conditioning, and clothes dryer all in tandem with this water heater. You have to do what we call “load management,” in which you stop to think, ok, toaster is 110 watts, dryer 4500, range is 8000 unless I only use one burner, turn up the air conditioning thermostat, and,,,, ok, now we can do hot water. And if you have electric heat, you’ll have to shut some of it off to avoid an overload, even with a 200 amp service. No, you can’t have a 300 amp service on a house, not without paying lots of money. Perhaps in the “home of the future.”
If it’s just two of you in the house, or if the kids only come home for Christmas, this all may work out well. You can save up to 25% over electric tank hot water by virtue of lowering your standby costs (the expense of keeping the tank hot and losing heat to the surrounding air). If your house is large, full of kids, or if you have a big kitchen and you’re always in it, beware.
Electric tankless water heaters are growing in popularity, and they should. But i’m always concerned when a past or potential client buys one off the internet and asks for a quote to install it. My bill for installation will commonly exceed the cost of the water heater, if indeed I can even shoehorn it into the house’s electrical system. Then I’m delivering the bad news, the phone goes “click,” and the unhappy client is off down the road to a plumbing company which knows not-so-much about electrical loading and is willing to take the client’s money for installing an inadequately sized unit. Happens several times a year.
Other technologies are more practical. Oil, natural gas, LP gas, almost any fuel other than electric power makes for a better performance in water heating, due to the ability of those fuels to deliver larger amounts of energy instantaneously to the water, exceeding electricity by far in the critical category of “recovery rate.” Watch your loading, watch your pricing, beware of claims made by salesmen bearing gifts, and consider all your options. Sometimes a heavy insulation blanket and a simple timer can turn an old electric tank into a lean, mean green machine, for a lot less money.
The device in the picture looks like a hubcap, I know. Is what it is is, it’s the single most encouraging breakthrough in small-output wind-powered electrical generation since, I don’t know, maybe Ben Franklin. The engineering genius of the Honeywell Wind Turbine is a bit over my head, but I’m an old electrician, and I know a superior motor when I see one: replaceable vanes for easy maintenance, vane orientation works with off-angle winds (obviating pivot bearings), weighs app. 170 lb. with six foot diameter, threshold generating begins at two mph wind speed, and the field windings are in the rim, out where turbine speed produces the greatest possible inductive force. Recommended minimum mounting height is 33 feet (the roof of a two-story American house with attic, roughly) and the retail package is self-contained, with inverter, charge controller and safety switches right in the box. Suggested retail price $6495 US. I found them being marketed at $4500 US, plus shipping. The Honeywell turbine will be marketed, initially, through Ace Hardware retail stores, and its output is estimated at app. 2750 kilowatt-hours/year in winds ranging from 2 mph to 42 mph. Depending upon your local utility rate, that probably means $$300 US or so in energy savings, all put back on the grid, operating, unlike solar PV, 24 hours a day, whenever the wind blows. Service life is estimated at twenty years, with a manufacturer’s five-year warranty. This technology didn’t come from China, it didn’t come from Europe, locations where energy is a higher priority socially and politically. It came from Honeywell’s R&D in the great USA, where innovation has for two hundred years been only one of the things we offer to a hungry global economy. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys, Willie Nelson sang. For heaven’s sake, encourage them to be engineers and researchers.
The oil derricks shown at left against a smoggy sky are located in……..go on, you’ll never guess– Southern California. And they could have been located outside Philadelphia, along the Gulf Coast of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or in the Caspian Sea of Central Asia. Oil derricks are everywhere, just not in your back yard yet. We are in a great and conflicted discussion about how and whether to tap the undersea oil reserves off our own coasts, and enduring a humiliating and damaging spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
I have noted in past posts that our reserves of oil, natural gas and coal are estimated to last us, globally, for at least 250 years. Is that comforting? For maximum comfort, stop reading here. Don’t go on and ruin a good mood.
One of the “right questions” to ask about world fossil fuel supplies is: when do we START running out of fossil fuels? When does world daily demand outstrip world daily production? When does demand begin to bring about stupid foreign policy behaviors designed to secure a supply of oil, gas and coal against future scarcity? When do the suppliers of oil begin to manipulate and torture (acceptable in economic circles, not so much in terror suspects) the consumers of oil by raising prices to punitive levels and controlling supplies to create artificial scarcities for their own purposes? When are we faced with the datum that we have used well over half of the original deposit of oil in the earth’s crust, and from here on the picture is going to get more and more difficult as we face slowly, almost imperceptibly dwindling supplies?
Probably you’ve stopped reading before now. If you’re not reading this, lucky you. The questions listed above are some of the many good ones that need answering as we contemplate the future of fossil fuels as our energy supply. We write these posts for ordinary people like ourselves, and we aren’t really up to the detailed math anyway. So here are some answers for ordinary people, and some opinions based on reasonable thinking. And here’s a wiki link to some straight talk about those hard questions.
Even if the hard data on fossil fuel reserves globally was not widely available (it is, but say it was a secret), we could make an observation or two about the behaviors of those powerful custodians of our welfare in recent years. Foreign policy in America is complex, but no one except a 9-11 consipiracy theorist (which puts Michael Moore and Rand Paul in the same cozy little bed, what a happy thought) could deny that oil drives much of American foreign policy for the last 20 years. OPEC (Oil Producing and Exporting Countries) has been staging artificial scarcities and fixing the price of oil for some years now, exerting an influence over world affairs out of proportion to the size and influence of the member countries. Remember, if you’re over 40, the Great Gas Crunches of the early 70s. And the equipoise of world daily oil consumption and production? We’re there. We consume more than we produce. By just 50,000 barrels a day as of late 2008. Think we’ve reduced our consumption since then?
So the information that we’ve got “lots of time, hundreds of years” to solve the energy equation and escape our deepening bondage to oil and the forces that control its supply is deceptive. Seventy five years of clear oil reserves, 250 years of coal reserves don’t seem as reassuring as they did. We’re already displaying scarcity behaviors. Our own American oil companies and financial investment industries manipulate the price and availability of oil for their own purposes. Hard to deny, then, that we’re in twilight, or at least the late afternoon, of the fossil fuel era. Won’t trouble you in your lifetime? All shortsighted, self-absorbed people get the hell out of the discussion right now. Goofy will begin your Disneyworld tour at five minutes before the hour. This is the Gotterdamerung of oil, the long retreat. Those who stay awake and keep watching “won’t get fooled again.” This is a time for serious people, both expert and ordinary, to do lots of thinking and a bit of talking about where we’re going as consumers of energy.
Renewables, including solar pv, solar thermal, wind and fuel cells, are a long, long, long payoff. Add two more ‘longs’ to that statement. We had a comment from a reader lately which quoted a conservative think tank to the effect that the numbers on renewables in the short term are laughable. The numbers said what the correspondent wanted them to, but they didn’t lie. Renewables is a long haul. And the owner of the first solar pv system in your neighborhood is sure to get laughed at for the huge investment and slow payoff. But those individuals and nations that are already acknowledging the slow decline of fossil fuels as a viable energy source are the far-sighted ones. Even their mistakes do them prouder than the smokestack economies and Drill, Baby Drillers. It will take daring, not denial, to secure an energy future for ordinary people like us as fossil fuels continue, year after year, to grow just a tiny little bit more scarce, and a measurable amount more expensive.
The photo at left shows Laguna Verde, the site of Mexico’s two nuclear reactors presently generating almost 5% of its electric power. Mexico has some oil and natural gas reserves, and has always been a net energy exporter. If you sense an irony in building a nuke plant in a place named Laguna Verde (Green Cove), don’t make a big thing of it. They haven’t had an environment-threatening accident since commissioning in1989, and recently Mexico announced its intention to convert the two reactors to operate on low-enriched uranium, greatly reducing its output of nuclear waste and reducing the possibility that waste from the plant could be used to manufacture a weapon.
Apart from the nukes at Laguna Verde, Mexico generates the bulk of its power from, you’ll never guess, hydro-electric. Mexico has only two fossil fuel plants, each generating about the same power as the Laguna Verde plant. Total generating capacity in 2007 was calculated at 50 megawatts.US capacity is estimated at just over 1 MILLION megawatts). The economy of Mexico is centered around agriculture, light industry and tourism. Any jokes about the drug trade at this point would be in very poor taste. Mexico struggles; Mexico survives; Mexico finds it very difficult to live in the shadow of the world’s largest consumer economy. Mexico needs a break.
Hence my modest proposal. The power utility in Mexico is government-owned. Mexican energy policy is already more progressive than that of the privately owned power utilities in the US, by quite a bit. Mexico’s power consumption is estimated to grow by 6% per year for the foreseeable future (US power consumption is estimated to grow by half that much). The Vicente Fox administration, recently replaced by the slightly more conservative Calderon administration in 2009, has outlined ambitious programs for exploiting the wind and wave potential of Mexico’s climate for power generation.
Why not make Mexico a solar test bed for the skeptics of the world? Mexico’s governmental power rests heavily in the centralized administration of the Presidency. The initiatives for massive solar projects would not be held up by, for instance, wounded bellowing from oil-addicted naysayers whose last names rhyme with McConnell and Palin and Cheney. The problem, as is so often the problem, is money.
Mexico is relatively poor. Mexico is also beset by a thriving drug industry that operates within and without its system of laws and enforcement agencies. Mexico is Colombia ten years ago, in one sense. If the Chinese, Saudis, Venezuelans and other cash-rich groups want to foster the next emerging superstate on the globe, why not Mexico? The credit of the nation is not perfect; a credit crisis in 1994 was embarrassing; the recent US recession has prostrated Mexico’s GDP for reasons that are widely discussed in the media. For good or bad, Mexico’s economy is tied to that of the US.
What if Mexico had an energy surplus, a power distribution system that was spread over the country via solar PV farms and wind farms to permit the growth of local industry (and yes, i’m no fool, the possible relocation of more manufacturing jobs from US companies, to the detriment of the US job situation, already strained) and entrepreneurship by local and foreign interests?
What if Mexico could offer solar power constructed near the site of any proposed manufacturing facility, creating a national grid with flexibility and extra capacity to accommodate new growth? What if solar electric power came to the countryside and permitted the campesinos to farm more aggressively and operate light industry for export? what if every small city in Mexico had a solar plant to cogenerate along with the national grid and produce revenue and a bit of energy independence, leading to a more decentrialized economy?
What if? I don’t know where the money will come from. But the world has money, and the world’s creditors should be taking another look at a society that already has progressive energy policies, a workforce proven in its desire to earn higher wages (that’s why they cross that river, Bob), and a centralized government in which things can get done without undue wrangling from a stubborn obstructionist ox-brained unlettered shrill-messaged war-friendly faux-religious opposition. Unlike any other society bordering Mexico, in any way at all, certainly.
Mexico is ready for alternative energy. The US is mired in denial and old-time religions centered around oil. The Mexican people are already motivated to pursue economic improvement, even to the point of moving to the US and sending their meager wages back home to loved ones. Mexico deserves a chance. An alternative energy boom in Mexico could take on the excitement of another gold rush, and the result can only strengthen a state that needs every advantage to deal with its internal problems.
Bluntly put, 23% of US energy consumption is supplied by coal. We have enough coal reserves to meet our complete energy needs for 250 years. Natural gas, a byproduct or co-recoverable resource with oil and coal, supplies 24% of our energy needs, and we increase our ability to find and recover it each year. Crude oil, about which so much political ado has prevailed in the last 50 years, is still partly a domestic resource. we only import about half of our yearly consumption. And oil supplies app. 37% of our national energy needs.
If you subtract industrial use and home heating, coal supplies, through generating plants, about half the nation’s electric power. Natural gas generation, nuclear generation, and renewables do not promise to put coal out of the picture soon. A HUGE portion of the nation’s carbon footprint, if you care about global climate change, comes from the burning of coal.
We recently lost 29 miners in the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion, and we lost 47 miners in 2006 in the Sago mining disaster. Coal mining ranks with commercial fishing and military service as the most dangerous professions in this society. We all listened and watched as prayers, opinions and excuses went up all over the country over the fate of those 29 men, and the question came up once or twice: Do we have to do this? Do we have to put men and women at risk to gouge coal from the earth profitably, burn it in some of the dirtiest smokestacks to generate our electricity, deal with the effects of rapid climate change while wringing our hands or engaging in denial, and watch our hunger for energy as a society grow every year without respite?
Do we have to kill our miners at this rate to keep the coal plants burning? yes, apparently we do. Until we have an alternative, and right now we don’t, we have to keep drilling, mining, leasing offshore sites to the highest bidder and waiting for the accidents and spills. We have to have the energy. At any cost, human, economic and, apparently military. The quiet conspiracy to secure Iraq’s oil was a failure. “Clean coal,” at least so far, is a myth few of us can buy. Nukes are scary, and dirty in the long run (dangerous to all life forms for 159,000 years after disposal).
We have no choice. We will continue to put miners at risk, drill and pipe natural gas, float drilling rigs where a spill could be disastrous, and humble ourselves at foreign tables, if not spill American blood, to secure a share of the world’s oil reserves. We don’t know how long we can keep this up; but we don’t have a plan to free us from this dangerous and expensive cycle: the pursuit of more and more energy. God bless the miners, drillers, reactor jockeys and power plant workers. We need you more than we let on; and we sacrifice you at a rate that would shame an enlightened society.
A prime parameter in the specs for photovoltaic system installation in the Connecticut Clean Energy guidelines refers to shading of the panels: to wit, no shading allowed during the normal “solar day,” reckoned to be between 9 Am and 3 Pm. It’s a pretty stiff requirement here in tree-covered New England, and it may seem unfair to disqualify a potential roof site because a tree shades it for part of the day. But here, in brief, is the danger of shading and the logic behind zero tolerance for it.
A solar PV array is configured in “strings,” or source circuits, of two to 12 panels, according to system voltage. The string of panels is connected from one to the other via the connected module leads so that the current through the string is constant, and the voltage of each module adds up to the nominal system voltage, anywhere from 24 volts for small battery-connected systems to nearly 5oo volts for high-output grid-tie systems. And in that string, or series circuit, a little patch of shade can limit the current of the entire string to a small fraction of capacity. Diodes are installed to permit current to bypass shaded or malfunctioning modules or cells, but the effect is still significant on performance.
Shading analysis in the planning stages is critical to predictable and maximum performance. If an area selected for panel installation is shaded, the time and extent of the shading must be calculated and deducted from the expected output of the system. Sometimes module choices are affected by shading analysis; “amorphous” crystalline cells are slightly more shade tolerant than other module types.
Non-grid tie systems suffer at least as much, if not more than grid-tied arrays. If batteries are matched to the output of the array, a small shaded area alerts the Maximum Power Point Tracking device in the inverter, which senses the efficiency and total output of the system, simply shuts down and waits for the shading to pass. For the duration of the shading, the system sits idle.
Shade analysis, then, is a vital part of planning when photovoltaic arrays are being sited on rooftops or on the ground. The panel manufacturers and government agencies aren’t kidding when they say that zero shading is the proper amount. And we, installing professionals, may be advising you to trim or remove trees, or purchase costly racking systems to relieve shading conflicts; we’re not just upselling the job. Shade is your enemy in the solar game, whether it’s for hot water or photovoltaics. And for photovoltaics, a little shade can be deadly.
The photo at left is an early 20th century ad piece courtesy of the CL&P website. It depicts a “Future Kitchen” in which electric appliances and facilities stand ready to do the heavy work and make the kitchen a safe, pleasant place in which to work. The artist could not have dreamed of the extent to which our 21st century kitchens depend upon large supplies of electric power to function. Whether modern, highly energy-hungry kitchens and homes are good or bad, we’re unlikely to return willingly even to the simple facility in the picture.
Connecticut’s annual power consumption increases by about 2.5% per year, and CL&P is running to keep up with the demand, particularly the increasing peak summer demand as New England embraces air conditioning as a summer necessity. CL&P presently operates two nuclear generating facilities, Millstones 1&2, both located in Waterford. The utility also operates two coal-burning plants and a long list of natural gas-burning plants fed by pipelines from long distances. New gas burning plants are proposed, but construction has been halted on two projects due to financial considerations. A recent explosion at a gas burning facility in the commissioning stage resulted in five fatalities and a public rethinking of the wisdom of locating large central generating plants around the state vs. buying power generated from outside the state and paying a premium for transmission losses.
Today, March 23, the Connecticut State Senate Finance Commission meets to consider a proposal to divert funds allocated for renewable energy projects around the state to the General Fund to meet budget shortfalls. “Securitization” of Clean Energy Funds, allocated not from taxes but from utility surcharges, would effectively halt the progress of renewable energy growth in CT by ending subsidies for residential and commercial wind, hydroelectric and photovoltaic (solar electric panels on roofs) energy installations, leaving only corporate entities like CL&P and others in a position to invest in energy generation. The measure would effectively permanize the monopoly CL&P now holds over the energy future of Connecticut.
This link will connect you to a press release in which CT Governor Jodi Rell commits the state to a goal of 20% renewable energy consumption by 2020. The sleight of hand that would buy from hydroelectric sources out of state begs the question of energy independence as well as energy costs. Connecticut residents pay about 20 cents per kilowatt hour, as high as any state in the lower 48, exceeded only by Hawaii. The future of renewable energy in CT is tied to the future of consumer independence, reasonable power rates and the public’s influence over energy policy in this state.
Concern for the environment in American politics is at an ebb. The recession has focused our attention on the issues rubbing us raw: jobs, taxes, the failure of American corporation too big to fail, and the need for little taxpayers to shoulder a heavier burden to keep the whole system from tanking. But the long view is not an expendable luxury. What we do now will start affecting us a little next year, and a lot in ten years, when power rates will be even higher, and Connecticut taxpayers along with all Americans will see energy take a huge bite out of our ever-decreasing real wages.
The artist who drew the Future Kitchen above could not have dreamed of the appetite Americans would develop for the convenience of electrically powered devices in every room of the house. But that artist was a veritable visionary compared to the CT legislators who would consider selling our energy future for the little good the money might do in a bad financial (and political) year.
The house at left is roofed with solar panels. No doubt there’s a real roof under there, but someone has cleverly configured photovoltaic panels to cover the roof so neatly that the eye sees only tempered glass and aluminum frames. The roofing material under the panels will not deteriorate, seeing no sunlight, clomping feet or ice and snow, so its life should be at least as long as that of the panels. The panels are attached flat to the roof, with a slight standoff for cooling air, so wind forces should not be a problem in heavy weather.
Note, if your eyes are that good, the shadows of the small trees in the foreground. They indicate that the azimuth, or compass orientation, of the roof is exactly or nearly south-facing, and that no nearby features like trees or other building threaten to shade the panels any time during the solar day (popularly reckoned to be between 9 AM and 3 PM).
No nearby power lines appear in the photo, so it’s hard to be sure whether the panels feed directly out into the local utility wiring (or grid), or to a battery bank designed to power the house after sundown, or a combination of the two functions (bi-modal, it’s called).
A tiled roof in the background, along with mountains, suggests either a western US or possibly European location, places where solar panels are considered more progressive than kooky, and where local governments subsidize and encourage responsible photovoltaic installations. The local power supplier, or utility, may be purchasing the panels’ output at its own retail rate (net metering is the industry term), or it may be paying a “feed-in tariff” of up to twice the retail value of the power, a practice widely used in Europe and Canada to encourage the installation of solar electric arrays.
The residents of this house (subtle signs indicate this may be a barn) may spend some time each day accommodating their routines to the flow of solar power. They might operate their heaviest electrical loads, i.e. water pumps, refrigerators, dishwashers, clothes dryers, water heaters etc. while solar output highest, using their own power rather than purchases kilowatt-hours. They might adjust their lifestyles subtly to decrease power usage in the evening, using only lights and small loads while only battery current or expensive utility power are available.
Or, if the system has no “backup,” they may go about their business with no thought of loads, since the grid power simply flows into the house at night the same way the solar power flowed out through the meter all day. The local availability of sunlight, or “insolation,” may be as little as 2 kilowatt hours per day per square meter, or as high as six kilowatt hours per day per square meter, depending upon latitiude, climate, compass orientation and shading. The panels themselves may be as little as 12% efficient in transforming uv radiation into electric power, or they may be as much as 20% efficient, according to the quality and cost of the equipment when purchased. The panels, by their appearance, are not homemade, or if they are, they are meticulously framed and sealed. The wiring that connects them to each other is high-grade silicone with a sunlight-resistant coating, and the “inverter,” thedevice that transforms the panels’ DC output into AC power usable by house loads, also synchronizes that AC output to the grid power for resale.
This primer, with links, is meant to bring your thinking into the picture with solar PV and the role it may/will play in your life in the future. Next time you’re driving past a house with panels on its roof, picture yourself living in it. Solar power on the roof doesn’t mean less fun for people living under those panels; to the contrary, there’s something natural and comforting about being linked to this life-giving power source in a positive and profitable way. But you humans, if you go out there, use sunscreen.
The infrared photo at left shows radiant heat loss (yellow and red shading) in a typical residential window and door. It also reveals that the most grievous heat loss (purple, violet, almost black shading) takes place around the trim and edges of the opening. This is air infiltration, and it is your deadly enemy in keeping your house warm and dry and free of mold.
We’ve posted before on the hazards of air infiltration and moisture, and we’ve urged you all to arm yourselves with caulk, foam in cans, and sticky weatherstripping to fight the crannies that permit heat to escape and air to come in while you’re trying to heat or cool your house. Only in temperate spring and fall weather here in New England do we blithely throw open our windows and share the environment indoors and outdoors. In either high summer or deepest winter the potential for unpleasant temperatures and moisture accumulations indoors and makes climate control increasingly not just a luxury.
Enter the capitalist economy. Don’t fuss about with all that caulk and foam, say the strident voices on the radio and television; we can change your house’s energy performance in a jiffy with 1. new energy-efficient vinyl replacement windows, 2. new energy-efficient vinyl storm doors front and rear, 3. safe, energy-efficient blown-in insulation in attic and walls, no damage to your interior, 4. new, safe, “permanent” energy-efficient vinyl siding with optional foam insulation backing to save you lots of energy and money. And they take credit cards, and they have financial experts standing by to mortgage your house for the full amount.
No sudden moves, now. Will replacement windows perform startingly better than the wooden sash windows or vinyl double-hung you have now? Not if you reduce or eliminate air leakage ( infiltration) through and around your old windows. Then your old windows will perform nearly as well as any window on the market, give or take 15%. Surprised? Same story with the blown-in insulation and the vinyl siding. The best deal of the lot is the vinyl storm windows and doors. They reduce infiltration almost completely through your entry doors. The rest of the “home improvements” won’t pay for themselves any time soon.
The article linked here is from Journal of Light Construction on the subject of replacement windows and their rate of payback based on improved energy performance. The math doesn’t work. It takes a LONG time to payback the investment on new windows, doors, siding, and blown-in insulation. What takes a SHORT time to pay back? Anything that tightens your house, closes cracks, tightens doors and windows, and reduces air infiltration in and out. That’s the magic of home energy. Air. Stop it going in and out, you stop energy from being stolen from your house and your budget.
The boring conclusion is: nothing makes as big a difference in your house as caulk, foam and weatherstripping. Big ticket stuff like windows and viny siding works, eventually. But caulk and foam and gummy weatherstrip work today. If you hire a remodeler, handyman or do it yourself, it still works if you do it right. And it’s not too hard. Don’t hock the ranch before you’ve done the chores, ok?
